Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (23 page)

Yet if these thoughts are on the right lines, they have failed to persuade, for example, Peter Krentz, according to whom “the case for new [agonal] protocols evaporates” and hoplites “did not
qua
hoplites drive political changes in Archaic Greece.”
²³

5. Aristotle

So, let us turn finally to the political issue, also of course a source issue, and reconsider whether Aristotle was entirely off the mark in his postulated organic connection between form of warfare and form of polity in early Greece.

The first political community [
politeia
] that arose in Greece after the king-ships was based on the men who did the brunt of the fighting. These were originally the cavalrymen, because the strength and superiority in war lay with the cavalry. (Heavy-armed infantry are useless without formation, but the ancients had no experience of ranks and such matters, which is why their strength lay in the cavalry.) But as cities grew and the heavy-armed grew in strength, more began to share in ruling the state. That is why what we now call Polities were formerly called democracies. The ancient communities were of course oligarchically and monarchically ruled. (
Politics
1297b16–26, trans. R. E. Robinson, slightly modified)

Revolution, I would suggest, is at the heart of our discussions here, though it is a problematic term, the application of which to ancient Greece has been denied by no less a historian than Moses Finley.
²⁴
But Finley chose to apply what I consider to be an unduly restrictive, even anachronistic definition. So, although I agree with him on the absence from ancient Greece of an economic or socioeconomic infrastructure that would have allowed a permanent progressive transformation of the social conditions and relations of production (one thinks immediately of the persistence of slavery and other forms of unfree labor), I see no contradiction between that absence and the possibility of both the fact and the concept of political revolution: what the Greeks, Aristotle not least, called
metastasis
or
metabolê
. That notion, explicit in the Aristotelian
Ath
.
Pol
., is, I suggest, implicit here, where Aristotle employs a military-based schema to account for successive political developments not merely within one polis but on the grandest scale of Archaic Greek political development in general and as a whole.

The problem with this schema, empirically speaking, is that its generality is—ironically for the advocate of golden mediocrity—excessive. Structurally, as often in the rather disjointed
Politics
, it does not follow organically from what immediately precedes. Moreover, not all of its meaning is transparently clear. Nevertheless, that does not seem to me to invalidate its utility precisely as a thought experiment, or model. That is, it constitutes a set of simplifying assumptions about what sorts of conditions and variables must necessarily be present to account for, not just the differences between the various sorts of Greek “constitution,” but also the causal connections, the developmental interrelations, between them. Above all, the general context of Aristotle’s thinking here is not only abundantly clear—the military dimension of a polity can serve, or be made to serve, to inflect or determine its fundamental nature—but also, to me, persuasive. But, no doubt, that will not necessarily persuade all readers altogether.
²⁵

Conclusion

I should like to end on a more general than a narrowly hoplitic note, quoting from a Theban praise poet writing, for once, not in a triumphalist vein: “War is sweet to the inexperienced but anyone who has experienced it fears its approach in his gut” (Pindar
fr. 110).
²⁶
But let us not only fear war’s approach, but rather, with Donald Kagan, actively seek, and seek to promote, “the preservation of peace.”
²⁷
One useful way to do that, perhaps, is to reexamine the mainsprings of Western warfare in Archaic and Classical Greece: let the
ôthismos
commence.
²⁸

Notes

It was a huge honor for me to be invited by Don Kagan and Greg Viggiano to give at Yale on April 4, 2008, the opening talk of their Hoplites conference, held under the auspices of Yale’s International Security Studies program and Department of Classics. This chapter reproduces substantially that quite informal presentation, with the addition of some rather light annotation.

    
1
. I began my participation, as an undergraduate student of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix at New College, Oxford, just about the time Victor Ehrenberg was writing his
From Solon to Socrates
book (1st ed. 1968). Referring back to the struggles over early Spartan history of his academic youth, Ehrenberg wrote there of his involvement in a form of “intellectual gymnastics” (1968: 380 n. 2).

    
2
. Cartledge 1977, 1986, 1996, 2001 (where fuller documentation, ancient and modern, may be sought).

    
3
. Rich and Shipley 1996; Raaflaub and Rosenstein 1999; Meissner, Schmidt, and Sommer 2005 (rev. E. L. Wheeler,
BMCR
2006.07.55); Pritchard, ed., forthcoming.

    
4
. Garlan’s
La Guerre dans l’Antiquité
(originally Paris 1972, 3rd ed. 1999) was translated as
War in the Ancient World
(London 1975) for a series edited by Moses Finley. Garlan 1989 marked a further development of his polemological thought, in a specifically economic direction: see my review in
Gnomon
62 (1990): 464–66. The book of Snodgrass’s Oxford doctoral thesis, published in 1964, quickly gave rise to Snodgrass 1965 (reprised, together with essential contextual material, in Snodgrass 2006).

    
5
. Especially of course in the work of Kendrick Pritchett (1991), but also for instance in Hanson ed. 1991 (two essays out of the nine). Cf. Krentz 2007a: 158.

    
6
. Rawlings 2007; Sabin et al. 2007; De Souza 2008.

    
7
. It is perhaps somewhat risky to find oneself lined up in the ranks with my old friend Victor Hanson, but I have to say that the very title of his present contribution did cheer me. Revisionism has its place, here as elsewhere; indeed, insofar as “progress” may be made in any field of historiography, revisionism must have a place. The question, always, is what sort of a place? Conversely, orthodoxy is probably to be rejected
eo ipso
only if it is orthodoxy of a caste-imposed and -enforced kind. Cawkwell’s review of “orthodoxy and hoplites” honestly “ends on an agnostic note” (1989: 389).

    
8
. Compare Hanson 1999; Hanson and Strauss 1999.

    
9
. The phrase of Sitta von Reden, in a forthcoming work on money and coinage in the ancient world.

  
10
. As Morgan 2003; but see my review in
CR
n.s. 55 (2005): 198–200.

  
11
. As Vlassopoulos 2007.

  
12
. Wheeler 2007a: 187 has done well to remind us of that.

  
13
. Hall 2007: 155–75 is an especially strong account from the methodological point of view, all the more so for being embedded in a general history of Archaic Greece. Van Wees 2000 conscientiously distinguishes between the
realia
, the actual pieces of equipment extant, and
the more or less idealized representations. For the latter see now Muth 2000 Part III, “Das Spektrum der Hoplitenkämpfe: Vielfält an Siegern und Vielflt an Opfern,” esp. “Die nicht-narrativen Hoplitenkämpfe: Pendeln zwischen Sieg und Tod?” 142–238.

  
14
. For very different recent readings of Tyrtaios, see Hall 2007: 166–67; and Singor 2009: 591–92.

  
15
. Krentz 2007a, 2007b, and this volume; van Wees 2000: 156, and this volume; Singor 2009.

  
16
. Dr. V. Stamatopoulou kindly shared with me the findings of her Athens doctoral thesis on the “Argive” shield: Stamatopoulou 2008.

  
17
. Latacz 1977; developed by van Wees 1994, 2000, and 2004: 183; and see very recently Raaflaub 2008.

  
18
. Snodgrass 2006: 346 pays due tribute to Latacz’s pioneering interpretation.

  
19
. Pritchett 1986 convinced H. W. Pleket,
Mnemosyne
45 (1991): 266, that there was indeed “massive hoplite warfare in early Archaic Greece,” though Hornblower (1996: 396,
ad
Thuc. 4.96.2) may well be right that “only an unusually arrogant scholar could claim to know what really went on in a hoplite battle.” (I owe that reference to Dan Tompkins.) Hunt 2007: 108–9, 111–13 airs the propositions that the hoplite panoply innovation spread within a generation but that classical hoplite fighting developed slowly and hoplite dominance was less long and less complete than the traditional view would hold. Krentz 2007b, following and citing Raaflaub 1997, argues that there was no space for a hoplite revolution, or even a serious hoplite reform. Osborne 2009 has only a couple of (good) pages on hoplite warfare.

  
20
. A possible analogy for the general type of question under consideration might be drawn with the introduction of silver coinage in the sixth century BC. For all the differences in detail, this likewise is a case of a compound of the severely pragmatic-utilitarian with the heavily ideological.

  
21
. Hanson 1999: 403, referring to Hanson 1995. See also Hanson, this volume; and, especially, Viggiano, this volume.

  
22
. Cf. Santosuosso 1997. On equality and citizenship in early Greece, see now Cartledge 2009. Note that, according to Burckhardt 1996, even in the fourth century BC citizen-armies were the norm as well as the ideal.

  
23
. Krentz 2007b: 76, 80; and Krentz, this volume.

  
24
. On the theoretical issue of “revolution” in antiquity, see, with caution, Finley 1986. The Goldhill and Osborne 2007 “revolutions” collection does not, unfortunately, consider warfare.

  
25
. For my most recent engagement with Aristotle’s political thought, see Cartledge 2009.

  
26
. I have used the translation of Krentz 2007b: 79.

  
27
. Kagan 1995.

  
28
. Matthew 2011 unfortunately appeared too late for my consideration here.

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